Sense in Reticence Ability

Frederic Raphael, asked which chamber in the castle of his life he kept locked and its contents safe from scrutiny, after the lead character in (and who, aided by such strategic concealment, admitted by him at the end, had led) A Double Life, a novel by Adam Morris, lead character in Raphael's The Glittering Prizes; "It is the very idea of being known that [Raphael] is questioning": "Part of us is nothing to do with anyone else. That's all. There has to be something that one withholds. Reticence has a way of being very eloquent."

"I have a caustic way of speaking. I am much cleverer than other people, and I'm not afraid to let them know it. There are probably good reasons why I excited the antipathy of stupid boys."

Albert Cossery, Egyptian-French novelist, via the two tenets of the practical joker Heykal from his novel The Jokers: "Number one is that the world we live in is governed by the most revolting bunch of crooks ever to defile the soil of this planet ... Number two is that you must never take them seriously, which is exactly what they want."
Gore Vidal: "I'm exactly as I appear. There is no warm lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water."

Philine, in Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: "If I love you, what business is it of yours?"

Bob Dylan, long since wearied of playing The Voice of a Generation, asked by a journalist to play the proverbial Artist as Lawgiver regarding the latest nine-days' wonder "burning issue" agitating the period hippoisie: "It's all in the music."

"Colonel" Harland Sanders, Kentucky Fried Chicken founder, asked his opinion of the hippies: "They eats chicken, don't they?"

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